


The Swan

by Lochinvar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aging, Baby (Supernatural) - Freeform, Big Brother Dean, Boys In Love, Boys Kissing, Caring Dean, Caring Sam, College, Comfort, Curtain Fic, Dean 2nd Person POV, Domestic Dean Winchester, Domestic Fluff, Domestic Sam, Don't Have to Know Canon, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Foster Parent Dean, Foster Parent Sam, From Sex to Love, Future Dean Winchester, Future Fic, Future Sam Winchester, Gardener Dean, Gen, Growing Old Together, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Married Life, Mechanic Dean Winchester, Mild Sexual Content, Mild Smut, Old Age, POV, POV First Person, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Professor Sam, Protective Dean Winchester, Real Life, References to Sex, Sex, Slice of Life, Small Towns, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 10:02:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4217436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lochinvar/pseuds/Lochinvar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You deserve happiness today and tomorrow, as does that sweet, sweet man you wore out an hour ago.</p><p>Want you to know what love and sex will look like, taste like, feel like when you can’t stay up past 10 pm without a three-hour nap in the middle of the day.</p><p>Let’s call these the Three Advanced Laws of Sex Physics, courtesy of your future Winchester self.</p><p>Cautiously rated Teen to cover some language and references, but no overt smut.</p><p>Ode to sex now and when you are old. After the boys hang up their weapons, the Apple Pie life and more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sex On Demand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Linden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Anchor and Moor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3200159) by [Linden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden). 



> Came out of discussions about how views of sex and relationships can change over years, decades actually, and sex at 25 is not the same as sex at 65, and how love can keep getting better. Also with much appreciation to many of the nice people here who have inspired me, but wanted to single out Linden who is the first of a growing list who simply blew me away.
> 
> [Minor edits - November 15, 2015]
> 
> [Minor edits - August 28, 2016]

When you are 18 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you look like whipped cream on a banana split, begging to be licked off, no hands. Sex is a cross-country marathon, dusk to dawn to dusk, never making it to the bed, hell, barely making it through the front door, lost underwear (turns up two years later when someone’s visiting Parental Unit is cleaning under the couch cushions with a portable vacuum), running out of clean towels and hot water and clean clothes, roommates locked out for two days running, angry neighbors banging on shared walls, celebrating with double orders of huevo rancheros at 4 am at the greasy spoon in your town’s version of an urban ghetto. 

It serves 24/7 and has been closed down twice by the health department in the last six months, but slip the waiter an extra twenty and you can get shots of agave in your fresh squeezed orange juice, so you are pleasantly buzzed by the time you leave, but you handle heavy machinery well because you still have your teenaged, Chuck Norris reflexes. 

During the day you go to movie matinees. You sneak in flasks filled with Southern Comfort, dump them into giant cheap cola slurpees, and have _Big O_ contests the way other people have drinking contests. If you are quiet, sit way in the back under the balcony, and are respectful to the kids who take tickets, sell candy, and sweep out the theaters between showings, they will leave you alone. 

Sit through the same movie three times. Stumble out in late afternoon into a blinding sun, totally wasted on liquor and sex. Walk back to whose apartment is closer to the movie house, get yelled at by your lover’s roommates or your own, find an empty bedroom, lock the door, pull each other’s clothes off, and collapse on a bare mattress, and _You Have No Clean Sheets,_ and you were planning to go the laundromat, until you got the idea for a private marathon of the last run of a movie that everyone else saw three months ago, so the theater would be empty.

So, whoever actually pays rent in that apartment sprints to the bathroom au naturel, takes all of the towels, and makes a coverlet of towels and someone’s sweaters. You sleep like the dead.

And, when you wake up the next morning, maybe you are in someone's else room, someone else's apartment. You find your clothes, use your finger as a toothbrush, and arrange your hair with a borrowed comb (never got the name). You show up for your minimum wage job with your lover’s roommate’s favorite unisex scarf around your neck, hiding the most recent batch of suck marks, explaining to your boss that you mostly are over that bout of food poisoning. And you are wearing the same clothes for the third day in a row, and they (you) smell funny.

And then you do it all over again that night, knowing the food poisoning story no longer has traction, but you don’t care if you lose that job, or the next one, or starve in the cold and dark, when your body sizzles like this, and you are sure you will take down the Mid-Atlantic Power Grid if you so much as touch a toaster.

And if you happen to be a hunter, trained in combat and practicing death and destruction since before you were tall enough to ride the State Fair Ferris Wheel, sex becomes a prize fight, and you are the prize. And, if you happen to know the person pretty well in the biblical sense, you know a thousand ways to make him happy, and you only are up to number 324.

Your record, because you are male, might have been seven times in one night, just for the heck of it–you will do almost anything on a bet–particularly if it is the man of your dreams, and you are feeling invincible.

If you had been female, well, let’s just say I know a girl who completed her own run around the track 14 times in five hours with an imaginative 19-year-old partner before she broke her endocrinological system and had to give up sex. For like a day. Tragic.

So, sex, particularly sex with him, the best, the favorite, is sunrise, a force of nature, inevitable, and unstoppable. Yeah, I triple-dog-dare you not to think of him for more than ten minutes. I quintuple-dog-dare you to stop the clock of the moon and the sun and the stars and the comets and the planets. Or to stop thinking about sex with him for five minutes. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha again. You will fail at all of the above.

You are a starry-eyed addict, and the drug is deep in your marrow. No rehab for you. You come from kissing. You come from pushing his hand beneath your jeans and five minutes later you are done, and you stumble out of the living room, back ten minutes later, cleaned up and with fresh clothes, and damn if you are not ready, set, go.

You imagine that the “refractory period” is an urban myth, born in the 1950s of the same secret society of totalitarians who decided that sex was only for making babies and who announced that rock-and-roll was going to herald in the end of the world. Well, you have been to hell and heaven and purgatory and back more times than most people get to the beach in a good season, and you have the punch card and the frequent flier miles to prove it, and you know Lubbock’s favorite son Buddy Holly had nothing to do with the apocalypse those half dozen times you saw it launch with your very own eyes. And a couple of times you hit the red button yourself.

As crap as your life can be, you get to be very, very happy twice a day, at the very least. Unless he smirks and dares you. Double dares you. Then, all bets are on the table, and you limp for a week, and you tell your hunter buddies that the vampire was this big and this tall.

It’s 3 am in the Somewhere Motel, and the love, heart, and soul of your life is in a sexually induced coma from the latest _ohmyChuckwereallyaregoingtodothatIthinkwejustviolatedNewton’s14thLawofFucking_ entry in the International Olympics gymnastic all-around individual competition­–Boys In Love Part 23–and Mama, I am bringing home the gold. And your triumph is that you pounded him into submission, so he will sleep with no chance to dream, which means no nightmares tonight.

Outside the door, Baby _is_ dreaming–of escape velocity, going too fast over Red Mountain Pass, altitude 11,018 feet, on the Million Dollar Highway (aka the _“You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to drive it in a blizzard”_ Highway), rocketing between the nonexistent guardrails, the nonexistent shoulder, and the Milky Way, and that curved blanket of stars might be the only thing keeping her on the road. Baby is on the same astral plane where you and your babe were two hours ago. She felt tectonic plates crash, the epicenter a few feet away in a motel room bed, and she fell asleep with your happiness soaking deep into her Motor City bones.

Young sex is fresh Beaujolais nouveau, raw cookie dough, pie filling eaten straight from the bowl. Tasty spontaneous combustion. 

Now step away from the motel door, if you please.


	2. Law One:  You Will Be In Love, and More

Here you are, forty years from now. You still will be in love. And more.

Yeah, this is just like that English dude Christmas movie with the totally unrealistic ghosts, the one you and Sam watch every year and throw popcorn at the screen every time they get the supernatural stuff wrong. This is the future. You can see and hear them, but they can’t see or hear you.

You will sit in a red brocade-backed rent-a-chair and watch Dr. Sammy, Professor Boss of the Department of Cultural Anthropology including Old Supernatural Stuff People Think Other People Make Up, get one of those awards that college professors get. A plaque made of fake wood and fake brass, and they will spell the name wrong: _Wincestor._ Jeez.  
  
The check is nice, hey, a couple of zeroes more than you heard the first time he told you, and the meal's not half bad, even though there are too many vegetables. The guest of honor demanded pie for dessert for the banquet, just for you, and you get two slices, and your babe–excuse me, husband–is gorgeous and makes professor jokes during his speech that even you get.

And they love him. The faculty loves him. The students love him. And the ex-students love him. And that Really Important Dude from India talks about his Research Contributions to the Literature like he is Shakespeare or somebody famous. Which you finally realize, he is, assumed identity and all.

[The university’s angel-faced president who talks like Katherine Hepburn is sitting next to you at the head table. Everyone gets to watch you eat, but you get served first so it evens out, Yes, you say to her, it is a standing joke that we have the same name as those serial killers that used to run around the Midwest decades ago, setting fire to graves and leaving a string of bodies. The ones they never caught. Nope, no relation that we know of.]

And no matter where the two of you are or what you are doing, he always will be the best-looking person in the room. The one you can’t keep your eyes off for long. Or your hands. And you will be bored if he isn’t there. And if he is there, he will be the most interesting man in the world. Sometimes you don’t even notice there are other people in the world.

The folks in the town where you will be moving to in a few years, an easy drive to Big Deal University where Sammy ends up, will think it is dear that porn stars could offer themselves to you in unseemly ways, and you, indifferently, would step over them to have an excuse to bring him a glass of water.

This obsession is relentless, in fact it gets worse the older you get, and your worst nightmare will come true. You will become a chick in a chick flick movie, the star of your very own G-rated romance novel.

You will kiss the back of his hand, for no reason. You will fuss at the grocery store if they run out of his favorite marinated olives. You will run his laundry first. If you are sitting in chairs, the chairs will gravitate closer until you are touching–hands, hips, feet. You are lodestones, pulling at each other from a million miles away.

Preferring your boy to anything else or anybody else. Forever.

\------

One time you will get to meet a professional model, six feet tall, with thick, thick, black hair rippling in glossy waves and kitten-licking the small of her back, almond-shaped obsidian eyes, like a demon’s, and flawless skin the color of roasted cashews. She will have been on the cover of a half dozen checkout magazines, and you have seen her on tv at the Oscars or a coronation or something, on the arm of a movie star you recognize, so you know he must be a million years old, and you will recognize her and her name. And her name has four syllables, like Isabella or Catalina or Viviana.

Up close, she smells amazing, musk and flowers, and she looks even better, and she has a really good figure, if you get my drift, soft curves that defy gravity and make you blink, because there is so much there, there.

She will be remarkably beautiful and nice, no, it is not your imagination, she will be into you, having learned to appreciate old dudes when she was pimped out to generous and thoughtful businessmen on her first professional gig in Milan when she was fourteen. Job requirement, you know.

You will keep shifting your position as you talk with her, because you will keep staring over her shoulder to keep on eye on your boy as he strolls around the faculty’s fancy pants restaurant at Big Deal University at the lame fundraiser for yet another lame cause. And you see him, and he is all there is. And she suddenly looks so young and damn cute, like a puppy, in comparison. Innocent. A kid.

She feels the shift, like a rancher feels the change in the wind as the rain cell barreling across the Great Plains through the Oklahoma Panhandle course corrects and moves south, and he knows it will miss his property by more than a country mile. Her smile freezes, for a beat, and she turns and triangulates your objective, just like her younger brother the Army sniper explained at the dinner table his last visit home. She turns back with a sweet, rueful smile and moves on through the crowd towards the banker who is rumored to own most of Arkansas.

\------

To be perfectly clear, it is not lame to help people or raise money for other people to help other people. It just that when you see something that needs to be done, you will do it. Hands on. Feet first.

If some homeless kid needs feeding, you will feed him, give a clean bed, his own room, a reliable source of hot water, and a better set of used clothing, teach him about music, find him a job at the vet clinic or garage or bakery, get him back into school and threaten his life until he gets his GED, find him that scholarship to the better tech school in the county, threaten his life again and again until he stops drinking and smoking cigarettes and weed for good (maybe not the way the experts prefer to conduct an intervention but the Fear of Chuck and You will work reliably and get the job done), and if you are lucky, you and your babe will dance at the kid’s wedding when he marries that really decent, straight-up girl or boy who is going to take over the job of keeping him in line into the next life.

Twice the happy couples will name the first baby after you. And you will cry in your babe’s arms when you hang up the phone both times.

And you do it again. And again. Until you will have launched a platoon of Lost Boys and Girls into the world.

And you will offer free car repair for folks down on their luck after your posted shift at the garage–the one that has your name on the front window–ends at 7pm. You will fix the fire truck for free. And you will tune the law enforcement cars in the county so nothing, and I emphasize _nothing,_ can outrun them, except maybe Baby. Well, of course, Baby.

You will be good at gardening. You donate extra veggies to the county food bank. Too much for two grown men to eat, even with the never-ending parade of unofficial foster teens that annihilate bags of groceries like plagues of biblical locusts. And you build a bigger dining room the size of the old _Road House,_ big enough to hold your platoon and their families at Thanksgiving dinners that spill into every room in your sizable house, which seems to be overflowing with stray kids and cats and dogs, and folks who stay to help, but you can’t quite figure out who is paying them or how, or why. And it all works, because that’s how good a manager you are, without even trying

And Sammy is there, helping with housework and homework, and bringing along his own platoon of big-brained college students, who mix in with the lost kids, and they help each other, and one day you realize you live in a frigging Disney movie. And instead of freaking out, you just smile, and pass the potatoes. 

You will volunteer to teach the town kids gun safety and take them deer hunting when their parents are too busy and help keep down the homicidal white tail population–the ones that like to jump in front of cars at midnight–and donate the extra meat to the county food bank.

You will leave Baby at home eventually, because you need a truck to run errands, big enough for those saplings you cart around, because you will have decided that everyone needs an apple tree in their backyard, and you teach yourself about Roxbury Russets and Cox’s Orange Pippins. And after 30 years you have planted a forest canopy in your town and inspired a dozen more Dean Appleseeds as well.

You never will be good on community boards or committees or anything that requires you to play well with others, but you can build anything and fix anything, so you will cut down storm-damaged trees for the old ladies, who are not so much older than you, and you will help out at the high school with the harder parts of constructing sets for the annual musical, which is damn fine every year, and you will buy a dozen tickets and pass them out to good customers. You will review the plans for the new hospital and solved a couple of design problems that had stymied the architects, because you know how things actually work.

You will carry bags of groceries out to strangers' cars. You will drive around after blizzards and shovel out strangers’ cars. Work a day every two weeks at the gunsmith’s in the next county, so Walt can drive the three hours each way and spend a short afternoon with his mom at the nursing home twice a month, rain or shine.

You will qualify for your EMT certification at the community college. You will be surprised how well you do in a real classroom. You will be on call two weekends a month and will be on the spot at two major highway pile-ups. Will save the life of that girl who tried to kill herself with pills stolen from her English teacher’s purse. Ten years later, she names her first boy after you, actually, decides to call the boy Campbell. And you cry. Again.

\------

The point being?

Your new life won’t leave as much time for sex, will it? 

\------

Your love for Sammy will dig a hole in your heart to China, then backfill it over and over again. Each time there will be room to let someone else in, until some day, the mayor of your town–Your Town, and there is not a monster in the many levels of creation that will dare slither into Your County let alone into Your Town–will wake up and realize this very pleasant place to live is that way in part because it pretty much runs on the hands and back of a gruff old man who dotes on kids and is as good a teacher as his big-brained younger brother, the one who writes books about monsters.

(One of those books will be made into a decent movie, don’t look at me like that, maybe makes it onto the top twenty list of the coolest things that ever will happen to you boys in your equivalent of a hundred lifetimes of cool.) 

The mayor will decide to throw you a surprise party. Act surprised, will you please? Actually, a world-class barbecue. And will invite 1,000 of your closest friends.

They will close up the town for 24 hours on a Thursday, and the hardware store will be locked up for the first time since President Kennedy’s assassination. The weather patterns in that part of the United States will change permanently because of all of the smokers and cooking pits at work, sending sweet fumes into the trophosphere and triggering auroras in the thermosphere as far south as Silver City, New Mexico.

The governor will declare _Dean’s Day._ (The mayor pulled him out of that bar in Milwaukee just before the Shore Patrol showed up back in the day.)

Actually, the governor does not mind, being he owns a cherry 1956, two-toned, Adobe Beige/Sierra Gold  _Chevy Bel Air_ that Dean tunes up once a year before the annual Governor’s Cup Rally, so it sounds like Patsy Cline on charred white-oak-barrel bourbon, if Patsy had been much of a drinker even before she found Jesus Christ again. 

As a matter of fact, the main difference between your day and Christmas will be that militant atheists and other folks who can’t or won’t celebrate Jesus’ birthday will celebrate you. 

(When you ask Esther, the nice Jewish lady who will run your favorite garden store out on the main county road into town, the one who will seem to be able to score any seed or plant you will ever want, the one who will talk tomato plants into believing that they are perennials, why she has a holiday tree hung with angels up in her store in December, she will lean on her elbows and whisper across the counter, “Sweetheart, it is not that big a deal. You know,” she will tell you confidentially, as if she sharing a big secret, “Jesus is Jewish.”

And when the whole town toasts you with fizzy lemonade and bourbon and Walt’s Very Private Label Moonshine, Sammy will cry.


	3. Law Two: In The Future, You Will Have Sex.

There is the celebratory sex you will have when everyone in the freshman Cultural Pathways seminar aced that tough surprise quiz Sammy threw at them because he thought no one was paying attention.

And the comfort sex when the state police asks you to detail the old Saturn SW1 that belonged to the young father who was collateral damage in the bank robbery while visiting the big city. They will tow his car back, so the family can sell it for funeral expenses. 

There is sad sex and happy sex and medicinal sex. There is stress relief sex and affectionate "I really still like you even when you put the big spoons in the wrong drawer" sex. There is "it's cold and dark and scary outside and warm and light and safe inside" sex.

There is “I bought you this, wanna try it sex”, which usually will result in comedy rather than passionate couplings.

There is "we made time to coordinate our schedules after three weeks, and we are having sex, dammit, whether we feel like it or not" sex. 

There is pathetic "I can’t find anything in the house to read or watch or listen to" sex, as if I ingested the Library of Congress, or Metatron had zapped my brain, and I was still bored and whiny.

There is procrastination sex, so you will not have to work on taxes or that speech or scrub the oven and the ceiling after the orange souffle lift off and re-reentry event.

There is the you both will be buttoning yourselves into formal attire on your way to a faculty event that neither of you wants to go to, so in order to talk yourselves into going you bought yourselves new clothes, including amazing underwear, and while you are getting dressed, you knock each other off your collective feet, have amazing sex, fall asleep until morning, and your babe comes up with a simple, plausible lie to satisfy the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, the kind of lie your dad said was the best kind, sex.

There is looking over Sammy’s shoulder at some weird Japanese painting or Indian carving or Greek pottery in the shiny-good book his senior seminar students gave him at the end of the semester six years ago, and asking, earnestly, in your best impression of Pontificating Academic at Sunset as you point at the racy image, “You wanna try that, Sammy?” sex. Again with the comedy.

There is instead of and in addition to pie, sex. No one in the house except us, sex. And accidental sex when you thought you were going to watch a movie. 

The longer you are with someone, the more you know about them, the more you share, the deeper the physical feelings. The more you will be attuned. The more your souls will have swapped memories and mitochondria. The more that soul mate crap that Ash danced around in Heaven feels not so much a revelation as a given, like A Law of Nature.

More layers. More complexity. More rejoicing like Beethoven’s Ninth when the choir lets go, and Castiel and his buddies from the old garrison are singing along, sex. Worship, and good for our team, and it is butter in our gravy, sex 

That’s the good news. Sex is forever.

So, one thing more before we go back to that motel, so you can get some sleep and first crack at the hot water in the morning, before you, your babe, and your Baby head home to Kansas.


	4. Law Three: But It Won't Be The Same

But, first, no more binging on adult beverages. That will end when your angel explained about telomeres. You will not understand a damn word, but if you ask questions you know he will never shut up.

Castiel: A _lthough angelic grace can lengthen mortal human lives, you are not immortal, Dean, and I can not make you immortal, at least not today, and there are only so many times I can reconstruct your heart and liver to a semblance of functionality. There are consequences to a life of excess, Dean._

Then he will acquire that sad kitten-in-a-rainstorm-at-the-kitchen-door look and say, Do you really want to abandon Sam by dying too soon? And you will realize, as you did so many years ago when you sold your soul the first time, that you do not want to die. Because you love Sammy so much.

So you cut back your Hunter's Helper intake. Way back. 

You decide sex actually is better without alcohol, because as you get older, you pay more attention.

There is a cusp to life that corresponds to sex, sort of like the Continental Divide, where, once you reach the other side, you don’t take a single day for granted, and you either spiral down into fatalism regarding your personal End-of-Days, or you get it together, dude, and are grateful until your last breath, starting with better living, even if it buys you only 37 hours more with this incredible being you pledged your life to when you were four years old.

\--------------- 

One big change: Your body looks different today from what it was 40 years ago. You may not die tomorrow, but there will be the first time that, no matter how good he looks and how good you look, not much happens. And secretly you are relieved. You have that thing in the morning, as does he. And you are begging Chuck for a good night’s sleep, a clear head, steady hands, a functioning memory, and functioning knee joints.

You will nap before sex, after sex, and when you fall sleep during a sexual act, Sammy will cuddle you, and sleep will sort of, kind of, be as good. And you will be shocked, shocked, that your body does not seem to mind.

Oh? You didn’t have sex? I did not even notice, because that four-hour nap was so good. Can we do _that_ again some time?

And you make dates to nap. And you smile at each other provocatively and strip down to nothing and slip into your schooner-sized bed, nicknamed Nirvana, under warm flannel in winter and cool linen in summer, with a rickety fan blowing a breeze across the bow. Sounds good, huh. Okay, back to sex.

Meanwhile, sex is no longer balancing on the handlebars of that brakeless bike you found discarded in an alley, plummeting down the side of an iced up sledding hill on a dare, in one of those states where ponds freeze solid. Age will put on the brakes.

Even if you are _spry,_ a word that I plan to have banned from the English language when Chuck comes to His senses and puts me in charge, you are going to move slower. Joints creak. Strength slips away. Flexibility? Muscles flex, but not at the speed of sound. Honestly, not so much flex, more brittle bending, like dry weeds in the wind. Recovery time, not so good. Oh, so that is what they mean by refractory.

[Editor’s note: Catches up to girls as well. Finally. Okay, I get it. Revenge is revenge-y.]

Soft flesh ossifies. Skin thins, and a lot of stuff now just hurts, and not in that delicious sensory-overload way. In the ouch way, distracting and definitely not fun.

Which is another reason why 65-year-olds don’t play professional football, even if they might still be a reasonable threat to all but the worst that Heaven and Hell have to offer. Smarts replace physicality. The same is true in bed and on the couch.

Limber is a memory, even if you are some kind of Golden Years Yoga Master. Bathtub and shower sex are memories.

But shared bathtubs means cuddling, and you don’t remember a time you didn’t love cuddling. You just are going to need a bigger bathtub. With safety bars. Easier to maneuver.

And shared showers are all about, can you scrub my back, babe, and check out that funny spot the doctor found under my shoulder blade, the one he said I should keep an eye on? And tell me once more than I have not lost any more hair.

You take turns. You take turns focusing on the other person. You are tender, and you linger. 

Spontaneity is replaced by negotiation. Come on, when was the last time you slammed him against a wall or timed a move so you both rolled out of bed and hit the proverbial floor at the same time? Experimentation is replaced by long backrubs, which tend to work if you both don’t fall asleep first, in which case it is still all good.

Muscles deteriorate. Sammy will become gaunt with a saggy tummy and bony butt. You will become saggy all over, lumpy and bumpy. Gravity will pull at skin and flesh and bone. It will yank at your mouth, ears, and chin. Your perfect nose will grow, like Pinocchio’s. It will widen, and it will thicken.   

Once in a while you will stare in the mirror, and one day it will no longer be an underwear model staring back at you. Once in a while you will stay in bed an extra ten minutes and will watch that tall, stooped over, naked old dude get dressed for work. His shirts, which once strained against Mr. America-class muscles, now hang loose. For the first time, you admit that maybe, objectively, he looks better with clothes on than clothes off. And he is old, someone you would have not looked at twice at the local bar while you still were growing up. When you were, like, 50.

And do you know him? He is a stranger. There is an unfamiliar old man in your bedroom, putting on familiar clothing. That soft gray cashmere vest, that is classy and warm in those damn drafty lecture halls at Big Deal U. You would think with the amount of money they have squirreled away in offshore bank accounts they would have enough to keep a room a comfortable temperature in May. In the frigging 21st century. The last time you came to listen to a lecture on the Vampyre Through History–you will help put together the images for the slides–you shivered. It hurt. Which is when you bought him the vest. Yours is dark cream. And now that you are an old man, you know what dark cream looks like.

Sex will be more elusive, more fragile, harder to capture and hold, like a small wild thing. It no longer reliably comes when called.

(You used to be more focused, more driven by sex. Remember: Attachment will not be the same kind of obsession that lust was.)

Used to be you successfully could get off in the back of the Impala during Armageddon. Now, a damn bird tweeting at the damn window is a distraction.

And, were you both so chatty in the day?

Your better moves could make Sammy shut his pie hole for most of an eight-hour shift except for what you called his “goldfish on the patio floor” noises–gasping for oxygen. Now, in the middle of what use to be devastating tongue action he is musing out loud about taking out a mortgage to build a greenhouse, and damn if you don’t find that an interesting topic–a real greenhouse, with one of those hydroponic set ups and moveable grow lights, which can be clustered along moveable rails, and can we have the recyclable goldfish pond–okay carp, I get it– for capturing fish poop? Okay, now I lost my place, Sammy. What do you mean, start again, you think I am a damn dvd player wih a damn button that says Replay? Do you have any photos of that greenhouse? Can I borrow your sweater vest?

\------ 

You are kind of quiet.

My advice?

Take your time, now.

Take turns, now.

Cherish him, now.

Buy those butter soft, butterscotch-colored pajama bottoms and the sandalwood bubble baths. Now. 

\------

You have seen enough? Time to go back to today? 

Here we go. Back again. Only five minutes gone in today time. Sammy is still in his happy coma, and Baby is still dreaming of her Rocky Mountain High. The stars are winking out in the false dawn, and those robins that nest amidst the old wooden letters on the side of the motel, under bright lights, are waking up early and saying good morning John-Boy to their neighbors, checking the morning drive weather, news, and traffic reports.  
  
You are going to crawl back into bed and when Sammy wakes up you are going to get him his princess coffee and egg white omelet with the green stuff and let him eat in peace while you pack before heading back to Kansas. Kiss him on the cheek. He is and will be, forever, what you hold dearest, regardless what he looks like or if the two of you ever ever ever have sex again.

And that is the secret of great sex forever.


	5. Epilogue

Adapted from _Dandelion Wine,_ By Ray Bradbury, Chapter 28, The Swan.

When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth?

That’s what it is—the dragon ate the swan.

 

“For just a moment,” you will say, “I saw it.

“Saw what?”

“The swan, of course."


End file.
